Natural Progression

"The idea is that people in this day and age want to get their news lots of different ways and you can no longer just expect to put on a 6 o' clock newscast and have people turn up," says Daniel Webster, The FeedRoom's Vice President of News and Technology. One of the guiding principals of The FeedRoom has been to make the consumption of news more convenient for people. Going from the Web to cell phones was a natural progression says Webster, "The whole purpose of The FeedRoom is to take content and deploy it intelligibly to new platforms."

The proliferation of cell phones and increasing bandwidth capacity is making the delivery of video to cell phones a viable method of distribution. The telecom industry is also starting to think beyond bandwidth and is thinking more in terms of a cable model says Webster, "You are paying for the programming and I think that essentially that's where a lot of the phone companies are trying to get and the bandwidth becomes sort of the irrelevant thing in the background."

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Some cell phone users already have access to services like games and digital pictures. According to Webster, Sprint has done a lot of surveying to find out what type of new services people want. Their research has indicated it's streaming news. He says people are looking for piece of mind, "That's why I think you buy into the service because you want the security of knowing that when something happens you can find out about it and you can see the pictures related to it."

Consumer Experience

That piece of mind goes for just $2.95 a month. The industry standard is about $3.95 for a comparable service. The video will be initially deployed on two of Sprints handsets, the Samsung N400 and A500. Currently, Sprint has about 1,000,000 vision-enabled sets and that is expected to grow to 2 million by the end of the second quarter.

To access the video, people first have to download the application from the Web. Once downloaded, the video can be accessed after paying the monthly fee. The FeedRoom will be providing 5 to 8 clips at a time, with regular updates throughout the day. Each clip will be about a minute and 30 seconds, the length of time of a standard broadcast news package.

I had the opportunity to view a video sample on one of the Sprint phones. I was skeptical at first, but I have to say the quality of the picture was much better than I had anticipated. The streaming was very slow however, similar to viewing video on a dial-up Web connection. Broadcast delivers 30 frames per second, the Internet delivers around 15 frames per second and the cell phone just 1 frame per second. Of course the quality will be improving overtime and I think the excitement of viewing the news when and where you want will over shadow the short-term technical bugs.

Potential

"Sprint is sort of ahead of the curve and we view this very much as testing the waters and trying to figure this out without killing ourselves," says Webster. This will be the first time video news will be delivered to cell phones, so The FeedRoom will literally by inventing the process as they go along. Their decisions will be put to the test by consumers, who will ultimately decide how they would like to consume video via their cell phones. The real potential will be unlocked when The FeedRoom offers SMS broadcasting to subscribers for breaking news events. Overtime, the streaming video can also be geo-targeted, so people can access their local news and of course the advertising potential is enormous. At the end of the day, Webster says a news service like this offers people a common experience and it's just figuring out what is the best way to deliver it to people, "It's exciting. It's going to sort of change the way we think about communicating and news."

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About the Author

Stephen Warley has made a career out of assessing the future direction of television. From producing for CBS News and CNBC to working as a project manager for interactive media agencies like ThirdAge and Osprey Communications, he has gained an insider's view as to where tomorrow's content and business opportunities lie in the video media industries. He is currently an MBA candidate at Fordham University with concentrations in media management and finance. He can be contacted at swarley@tvspy.com